American POWs at the Stolp farm, Gus Pederson front row, third from right.
Clay County Histories
Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC
Six miles outside Stolp, Germany, 1944. Gus Pederson was a Prisoner of War in an Arbeitskommando (work camp) near the Baltic Sea, close enough to Danzig to hear American bombs falling on the city. After he was captured in Sicily, Gus spent about two weeks in a boxcar full of POWs as they travelled through Italy and Germany. He ended up working at a farm, which, for a 25-year-old farm kid from Barnesville, was not the worst place to spend 1944. Not far from him, Nazis were murdering and starving Russian and Polish POWs, and in the nearby Stutthof Concentration Camp, 65,000 people were murdered because they were born Jewish, or gay, or because they had political beliefs that Nazis don’t like. “That farm wasn’t too bad a place,” Gus reflected as an old man.
Why was he working on a farm? Because all the men in Germany were fighting the war, so they had to kidnap people – POWs, civilians, Jews – to work their farms and factories. At that same time, Moorhead had a camp of 150 German POWs working on farms around Clay County. It sure would be more efficient if nobody started wars so everybody could just work on their OWN farms!
On this farm, Gus shared a house was 13 kidnapped Ukrainian civilians, 5 kidnapped French civilians, 29 American POWs, a German family and farm foreman, and usually only an old man as a guard. They all spoke to each other in German, so Gus learned his third language. His family spoke Norwegian at home, he learned English in school, and he spoke German as a POW.
The workers were divided among different farms every day. They worked 12-hour days with half-hour breaks in the morning and afternoon, and an hour break for lunch. Farmer Gus was often chosen to work alone on more advanced jobs, and he was frequently left unguarded due to a shortage of German manpower. Gus couldn’t really escape, though, because he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t know where the nearest friendly army was, and he was so far behind enemy lines there wasn’t any point in running. He said “I wouldn’t be afraid of the German civilians at the time, but it would be Hitler Youth that would’ve gotten you. Even them little tots that were 10, 12 years old were drilling with wooden guns. They were patriotic as the very dickens. They wouldn’t’ve thought much of doing away with a Yankee.”
At some point, apparently, a photographer came to the camp and took photographs of Gus and his fellow POWs. Gus obtained a half dozen photos from his POW days, probably purchased with cigarettes he was hoarding from gift packages sent from Minnesota by his wife Jean.
On January 29, 1945, his guards told everyone that they had to move. The Nazis were losing the war. The Russians were getting close, and as the Red Army entered Germany, they were bringing Hell with them. The German people knew their soldiers committed uncountable atrocities when they invaded Russia, and they did not want to be in town for the Russian payback. Gus, his fellow POWs, his guards, and about six million German civilians moved west in what might be the largest mass migration of humans in history.
My last column was part one of the Pederson family POW story. My next article will conclude this story with a 600-mile walk to freedom. Or watch the whole story now by searching “Gus Pederson: a WWII POW Story” on YouTube.